Reduction in Windows CI capacity

tl;dr. GHC's CI capacity will be a reduced due to a loss of sponsorship, particularly in Windows runner capacity. Help wanted in finding additional capacity. Hi all, For many years Google X has generously donated Google Compute Engine resources to GHC's CI infrastructure. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Google X for providing us with what has undoubtedly amounted to tens of thousands of dollars of computational capacity over the years. I would especially like to thank Greg Steuck, whose advocacy made this donation possible. Of course, organizational priorities understandably change and Google X will be unable to continue their sponsorship in the future. This puts us in a bit of a tricky situation; Google Compute Engine is currently the home of nearly 100 cores worth of CI capacity, including: * roughly 20% of our x86-64/Linux capacity * our only x86-64/FreeBSD runner * all five of our x86-64 Windows runners While the Linux runners are fairly easy to replace, the Windows capacity is a bit harder since Windows cloud capacity is quite expensive (IIRC nearly half of the cost of our Windows GCE instances is put towards the license). In the short term I can cover for some of this lost capacity by bringing up a Windows runner using our generous donation from Packet [1]. However, I am extrmely wary of outspending our welcome on Packet's infrastructure and therefore we will need to accept a small reduction in capacity for a bit while we work out a more sustainable path forward. We will have to see how things go but it may be necessary to disable the Windows jobs on (non-Marge) merge request validation pipelines. I am looking into various options for again reaching our previous capacity, but this is an area where you might be able to help: * Familiarity with Windows licensing. Unfortunately the details of Windows licensing for virtualization purposes are a bit tricky. I suspect that the cheapest way forward is a single Windows Server license on a large machine but if you are familiar with Windows licensing in this setting, please do be in touch. * Providing Windows licenses. If you know of an organization that may be able to donate Windows licenses either in-kind or via financial support, please do be in touch. * Providing Windows cloud instances. If you know of an organization that may be able to donate Windows cloud instances, do holler. As always, we welcome any hardware or cloud instance contributions. Do be in touch if you may be in an position to help out. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://www.packet.com/
participants (1)
-
Ben Gamari